Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

China to Build a Zero-Carbon Green City

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the tired-of-getting-whined-at-for-beijing dept.

gormanw writes "Just outside Shanghai, there is an island about the size of Manhattan. China is going to build its first-ever 'green city', complete with no gasoline/diesel powered vehicles, 100% renewable energy, green roofs, and recycling everything. The city is called Dongtan and it should house about 5,000 people by the end of 2010, with estimates of 500,000 by 2050. The goal is to build a livable city that is energy efficient, non-polluting, and protects the wildlife in the area."

18 of 620 comments (clear)

  1. OMFG FASHION MELTDOWN by Aardpig · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...red and green should never be seen!

    --
    Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
    1. Re:OMFG FASHION MELTDOWN by arodland · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If the internet has taught us anything it's that the Infinite Monkeys Corollary is more important than the Infinite Monkeys Theorem. The corollary reminds us that it doesn't matter whether the monkeys turn out Hamlet, because you'll need to read through an infinity of worthless crap before you find it.

  2. Good Luck... by iamwhoiamtoday · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I hope that this pans out, but the manufacturing of said Renewable energy will probably offset the whole "Green" side of things... Well, hopefully it will all work out for the best. The question is, apart from Government financing, is it possible for Normal People to buy a Green Home / Car / Life?

    1. Re:Good Luck... by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The question is, apart from Government financing, is it possible for Normal People to buy a Green Home / Car / Life?

      Move close to your work (or get a job you can telecommute to), use a bike / walk / public transport wherever possible. Insulate. Put in a water tank.

      There - not that hard & no need to go whining to the government for a hand out.

      --
      There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
    2. Re:Good Luck... by dAzED1 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      you left out:

      become vegan, or at least vegetarian (the cattle industry is extraordinarily destructive to the planet

      fix things, instead of replacing them

      wear studier clothes, longer

    3. Re:Good Luck... by eln · · Score: 5, Interesting

      So basically the solution is to live close to an urban center. Unfortunately, housing is generally prohibitively expensive close to most urban centers (except for the ones that are so far gone with blight that there are no real jobs there anyway).

      The American city (especially in the west) is built around personal automobiles. The affordable houses are well outside of walking or biking distance to most of the jobs, and are too chaotically arranged to allow for efficient mass transit.

      Individual choice is part of the equation, but sane urban planning is also a big part of it. Cities and counties need to start doing more to encourage high density housing near urban centers and discourage the building of yet more suburbs and exurbs. Unfortunately, most local governments are too far in the pockets of developers to ever enforce strict zoning of that nature. Most of the new development I've seen near urban centers has also tended to be of the million-dollar-condo variety as well, which doesn't do a whole lot to solve the problem either.

    4. Re:Good Luck... by mrroot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Excuses take the responsibility off your shoulders so you can feel good about doing nothing.

      Bite the bullet and make changes. Over two years ago, I cut my commute in half by moving closer to the city (no its not an urban blight neighborhood, nor is it a million dollar condo). While everyone else is complaining about gas prices, I don't give it a second thought. That is nice, but the reason I moved wasn't for gas prices or for the environment, it was to conserve the most precious resource I have... time.

      If you commute 45 minutes each way to work, and let's say you work 5 days a week for 48 weeks out of the year (taking out 4 weeks for vacation and holidays). That means you spend 360 hours per year in your car driving to and from work. How many hours of vacation-time does your employer give you? 80? 120? If you cut your commute in half, you get an extra 180 hours per year!

      By the way, a really good book I read a while back is called "Take Back Your Time", and there is also a Take back your time website.

      --
      I Heart Sorting Networks
    5. Re:Good Luck... by amRadioHed · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The practices may be uncommon at this time, but I assure you that all of the vegetarians I know are completely normal humans. Anyone can do it.

      And for those who don't have the willpower to completely cut out meat from their diets (such as myself) eating less meat is always an option. It is really unnatural the amount of meat the average American eats anyway.

      --
      We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
    6. Re:Good Luck... by j.+andrew+rogers · · Score: 5, Insightful

      become vegan, or at least vegetarian (the cattle industry is extraordinarily destructive to the planet

      The "cattle industry" is essential to the ecology of places like the American West, where they replaced the critical role of vast herds of wild bison. A major percentage of the American cattle herd is raised on the range, marginally arable land, where bison used to roam. If you remove the cattle, you either have to replace them with bison (in which case there is approximately zero net benefit) or you can collapse the ecosystem -- your choice. In either case, you are neither adding to the amount of plants that can be reasonably grown nor mitigating damage to the environment.

      The idea that all cattle farming is necessarily destructive to the environment is ignorant nonsense. Sure, some of it is, but there is a large percentage that is not only non-destructive but actually allows us to produce food on land that would not otherwise be productive. Cattle were not genetically engineered from whole cloth in a lab by evil scientists somewhere in an effort to destroy the planet, they were a part of many ecosystems in temperate climates. We would not need to cut beef consumption nearly as much as some fringe vegans claim in order for it to be a net *benefit* to both the environment and food production.

      It does not do the credibility of the environmentalist movement any good when they assert the necessity of making dire choices for ideological reasons with no basis in fact. Yes, meat production could stand to be decreased and/or optimized. Completely eliminating beef from the human diet not only serves no practical purpose, it would actually be counterproductive to the stated goals in many cases.

    7. Re:Good Luck... by umbra_dweller · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Veganism and vegetarianism are certainly unusual for most people, but one can still try to "eat green" if they really want to by just eating less meat. These days I am experimenting with buying half as much meat as usual, but buying better quality cuts/dishes when I do eat it.

      I just watched a presentation from TED where New York Times food journalist Mark Bittman said that the average American eats 1/2 pound of meat per day (3.5 pounds/week), which is twice the amount recommended by the USDA. He suggests Americans could try eating 1/2 - 1.5 pounds per week instead - which could mean eating smaller amounts of meat with each meal, or eating the same amount of meat on fewer occasions.

      I experienced this when I lived in Asia for a year. Most of the meals I ate used vegetables, rice and eggs - big pieces of meat like burgers, BBQ and steaks were only eaten occasionally. But on the flip side, most of the vegetable and rice dishes were flavored with meat and fish broth or sauce, which gave meat flavor to each meal without actually including much meat.

    8. Re:Good Luck... by spydabyte · · Score: 5, Informative

      So most of the world now means the United States?
      Veganism in China and India (two of the worlds most populous countries) may in fact be a majority.

    9. Re:Good Luck... by alecwood · · Score: 5, Funny

      Didn't you know The world = The United States of America just ask any American

      --
      Real happiness lies in the completion of work using your own brains and skills.
    10. Re:Good Luck... by nebosuke · · Score: 5, Informative

      Organic means natural, sustainable methods and growing and harvesting crops in the right seasons. In fact, it is not a luxury when it comes to convenience. Organic produce means you can only have right crop in the right months.

      Having both grown up farming both organically and non-organically, as well as currently working in the seeds industry, I can say from both first-hand experience and industry research that that couldn't be more wrong. There are two points in particular that are mistaken.

      The first is that the conflation of geographic location with organic production. Most farmers' local markets include a significant (usually majority in my experience) non-organically grown produce. Buying local vs. freighted foods is entirely unconnected to organic/non-organic production.

      In many cases locally-grown produce has a higher total energy cost of production than foreign-grown produce. The archetypal example of this is tomatoes grown in the UK vs those shipped from Spain.

      In addition to non-optimal local growing conditions requiring more energy, smaller, local food producers almost always burn more energy per unit of produce than larger operations even in the same geographic region because large producers lower the marginal energy cost of production with economies of scale. Japan is an excellent case study of exactly this effect, as its market regulations strongly bias the market to smaller less efficient regional producers, causing the price of food to be significantly higher than it otherwise would be due to higher production costs.

      Geographic proximity is absolutely not a reliable indicator of relative energy consumption

      As for organic farming being 'sustainable', all it is is substituting human labor, land (production densities must be much lower to avoid pest population buildup), and excess energy (e.g., using a propane torch to kill weeds by application of heat, or more tillage passes to mechanically weed fields) for chemical and fertilizer use. Human labor is anything but cheap energy-wise, unless you're talking about basically slaves who were raised from childhood on an extremely low energy budget, and who are not afforded any of the luxuries of the society for whom they are producing the food.

      You mentioned that it is unfeasible on a global scale... what did you think people were growing before we had artificial fertilizers and pesticides?

      Before we had those things, population centers around the world (e.g., Mexico, India, China, Pakistan, etc.) were on the verge of an epic famine and the most extensive die-off of humanity this side of WWIII. A larger portion of agricultural lands were then also comprised of regularly cleared slash-n-burn fields fertilized by the ashes of the forest for a few years before the soil was depleted and more land needed to be cleared.

      The only argument that can have merit is the health issue, but that varies significantly by specific grower practice. Proper use of pesticides as per the label is proven to be safe, but it's unfortunately not unheard of for growers to misuse them, both knowingly and unknowingly. Likewise, many organic farmers improperly compost their organic fertilizers and put consumers at higher risk of bacterial contamination. In both cases we have government regulatory agencies watching for infractions, and they generally do a good job of keeping us remarkably safe compared to pre-green revolution days.

  3. Re:Dongtag? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's "Dongtan", which would be a good name for a nude beach.

  4. Re:Dongtag? by caywen · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, what an unfortunate name. I would have avoided that problem altogether and named the city Wangtan. Much better.

  5. Re:Exporting the pollution by Nefarious+Wheel · · Score: 5, Insightful
    No good deed goes unpunished, I see. Now if you were considered a "thought leader" (whether you wanted the appelation or not) of a country of several billion people, and you saw you were increasingly becoming the lead polluter in the world, how would you go about fixing it? Spend trillions of tax dollars directly lining contractors pockets, brutally supress the use of non-green energy, or perhaps -- just perhaps -- try to educate your populace into doing it themselves?

    It's easy to slag these efforts, yes they're flawed, but dammit **something** has to be done. Get out of the road if you can't lend a hand.

    --
    Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
  6. Oh my, where is the spirit of building things? by 2Bits · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh my oh my, where is the spirit of exploration, taking risk, experimenting, building things in this community? I often come here for insight discussion and interesting debate on things that matter, but instead, we got a flame fest.

    So, for this forum, anything done in China must be bad, negative, and nothing good could come out of it.

    Everyone is ohing and ahing when we talk about Mars terraforming. When China is experimenting a new project, everyone must slam about its politics, and there's nothing worth reading and discussing here.

    Tell you what, I'm living in Shanghai, I hate as much as the next guy the corruption, the pollution, the control on free speech, the human rights, ... all the negative things here.

    But for fuck sake, this is a project where the Chinese government is investing in, taking risk, experimenting, building things, ... this is a big project to experiment an alternative way of building human cities, to change the way we work, live, entertain, deal with nature, etc. Where else do you get to experiment at this scale, and with the financial backup like that? Ok, this may be a political show, but I don't see other governments dare to experiment and make a show like that.

    It might be a big flop, and it might be a huge success. The lessons learned might be useful for other regions on this planet, and even might be useful when we need to build outer space colony.

    And guess what, westerners (the Brits, Americans, French, Italians...) have taken a huge part in designing it too. This is not a one country thing.

    For those who only have negative things to say, let's get out of the parent's basement and go out more. Visit other countries, not all is well and perfect, but I'm sure you will learn a lot more too.

    You want to make China a better place? Don't whine in the basement, that won't change anything. Come here, bring your grand vision, your next big thing.

  7. Re:Obvious by jandersen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My God, This Is So Insightful Of You!!!!

    Because, of course the bloody commies are never going to do something good just because it is a good thing - they hate everything that is good. And of course they came up with this idea, the whole plan, the detailed architecture, the city planning, just like that in the about 5 days since the Olympics started.

    Come to think of it - I don't know which is most impressive: Starting a massive, green initiative like that and showing us all the way to the future, or coming up with it in no time at all, when it would have taken everybody else years to work out the plans.

    Back to reality, though: The Chinese have seen reality in the eye, just like we have - they know that this kind of things are necessary if we are to avoid choking in our own filth, and they know it has to happen on an absolutely epic scale. The difference is that they are taking action instead of waffling over who should pay and which foot to stand on.